Fat Lightning (21 page)

“Well,” she tells Marie, “I'm not going to be long.”

“Oh, that's OK,” her mother-in-law says. “Just leave it with him. Lord, I don't know what all he eats out there. Don't even know if that colored woman cooks.”

So Nancy carries a paper plate wrapped in tinfoil to the car, with a quarter of a pound cake wrapped in Saran Wrap and a plastic container full of potato salad balanced on top. Her purse is thrown over her shoulder.

“Sure you don't have a watermelon I can take in my free hand?” she mutters to herself as she opens the car door, furious that she has to perform this odious task, furious that she doesn't have the guts to just tell her in-laws she doesn't want to see Lot if at all possible.

It's 6:15 by the time she leaves the driveway. She can see that Wade is already being jollied out of his tantrum by his grandfather.

The sun will set in another 15 minutes, so she hurries through town and out to the state highway, then makes as much time as she can on the tight, shoulderless road to Lot's barn. When she passes the Jeter place, she sees that Simon Jeter has finally given up and let the road to Old Monacan take a detour through his bean field. He fought it for months, putting up barricades and digging trenches, but in the last week, with hundreds of cars a night coming through, Simon finally feared for his garage and was just happy to have the hordes of pilgrims pass as far away from his home as possible.

Nancy sees that the mourning wreath for Simon's grandson is still hanging on the door of the trailer nearest the road.

The sun is dead in Nancy's eyes now, coming in for a landing. She almost hits a stray dog who appears merely as a black shadow and then vanishes. This time of day, the naked clay where trees have been cleared turns a red that is painful to the eye. Nancy can feel her body unclench when she finally passes into the row of cedars that marks the beginning of the woods.

Here, night has already fallen, although the sky is blue overhead. Nancy fears she's too late, but when she turns the corner and comes up the slight rise, she can see the sun still hitting Lot's trailer.

She stops in front, where her car can't be seen from the house, closes the door softly and walks across to the barn, hoping for some peace before she has to confront Lot with his supper.

The area around the barn has the look of a fairgrounds the day after the carnival leaves town. The hard clay soil has been turned into mud by thousands of feet, and the smell is not unlike that of a hog pen. The trash from last night hasn't been cleaned up; even the metal chairs are as they were left by the final assault of pilgrims.

Nancy sits in one of the chairs nearest the edge of the viewing area and sees the sun hit the barn just above where the outline of the crucifixion could be seen a week ago. She squints, still seeing spots from the sun, but she realizes that Lot and Sebara must have squeezed the very last ounce of sunlight out of the vision. Jesus-on-the-barn won't be back until spring.

She sighs, sitting there in the hard metal chair, trying to imagine what her protagonist would have thought. The first evening wind blows the smell of cinders to her from the sawdust pile, and she shivers, feeling that she's being watched.

Nancy stays there for 10 minutes, and then she thinks she has what she needs. She turns toward her car, realizing that she has one more errand to do before she goes back to Monacan. She looks up toward the old house, now sinking into darkness, and realizes that every light in it must be on.

At least, she thinks, Sebara is around. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing this.

She decides to drive up to the front of the house, rather than walk the 50 yards and then have to walk back again in the dark. After she's negotiated the old driveway and taken the cold supper out, she looks back eastward and sees the moon, one night past full, rising above the woods.

She walks up the front steps, balancing her load, and knocks on the front door. Invisible in the darkness beyond the side of the house, she can hear Granger pleading to be released from his chain so he can eat this intruder.

After knocking twice, Nancy turns the knob and the front door opens. The room into which she walks is the big living room where the family meets at Christmas and Easter. It smells of ammonia and cleanser, but the general appearance of the room is of chaos. Shirts and dresses thrown over the floor and across chairs. A sidetable overturned. A lamp broken.

She takes no more than six steps inside when she decides to go no farther. She bends slightly at the waist and sets the dinner from Marie down on top of the television set. Let him find it himself. Whatever's happened here, let it happen without me.

She turns to tip-toe out, just as the door opens.

“Well, hey there, Holly,” Lot says, and Nancy feels a week's worth of adrenaline flash through her. His eyes are red and sunk deeper into his skull than usual.

“No. It's Nancy, Uncle Lot,” she says. “Sam's wife.”

“Don't you ‘Uncle Lot' me,” he says, more jolly than she's seen him in months. “Why don't you come see me more often, Holly?”

Nancy stands there, afraid to do anything. Lot's face changes in seconds.

“They cheated me, Holly,” he says, and Nancy can see that his lips are trembling. “They cheated me. But I got even with 'em. They're always messing with me.”

“Where's Sebara?” Nancy asks. She starts moving to the right, thinking that if she can get Lot to move a little farther into the room, she can run around the big livingroom couch and beat him to the door.

Lot looks puzzled.

“Who? Don't know no Sebara. Don't you be messin' with me too, Holly.”

Nancy remembers now that she didn't see the big Lincoln out front when she drove up to the trailer, and she didn't see it outside the big house.

“I have to go now, Uncle Lot,” she tells him, moving another step to the right, almost even with the other end of the couch now, as he moves a step forward.

“Why you call me that?” he asks her in a querulous voice. “Why is everybody a-trying to mess with my head?”

Nancy makes her move, pushing off from the couch and running for the front door. What does her in is the thumb bolt. Lot always locks it from the inside, and by the time Nancy figures out the workings of it, Lot has grabbed her right wrist.

“Please,” she says, trying not to let him see how scared she is.

“Come on, Holly,” Lot says, giving her a pull. “I want you to see what they done to me.”

She can't believe how strong he is. He's pulling her along with one hand, and she has to run to keep up. She screams once, and he puts a big, freckled hand over her mouth and nose and tells her, “Now, you got to behave, Holly, or I won't take you to Egypt.”

He takes her outside, to the other side of the house from the barn, toward the fruit trees where she was showing Wade the ready-for-picking apples a month ago. The moon is bright enough for Nancy to see them rotting on the ground as they go past. She sees that the yellow jackets have ruined them already.

They are almost to the grapevine when she sees the lump there, seemingly no larger than a dog.

“They took Daddy and Momma's money,” Lot says, but all Nancy can see is what obviously was human a short while ago. She tries to step backward, but Lot won't let go.

“Won't be taking no more, though,” he says, and then he turns Nancy a quarter-turn, facing him.

“Now, then. You see how he ought to of been killed, don't you?” Nancy nods. The moon shines off Lot's eyes, which look to be all black now. “It was like when they told all them lies about us. Some people, they don't deserve to live.”

Nancy is crying.

“Don't you worry none, Holly,” Lot says. “I know just what'll fix you up. We'll go over to Egypt. Wouldn't that be nice?”

Nancy has the feeling that she's in a dream, that surely she'll wake up in bed next to Sam's snoring. But it goes on. Lot drags her back from where they came, but when they get to the house, he doesn't take her back inside. Instead, they go past the barn. Nancy has stopped protesting that she isn't Holly, because that only makes Lot angrier.

Up ahead, there's only the sawdust pile. The smoke that rises from it day and night has turned the moon behind it a coppery-red.

“Now, first, before we go to Egypt,” Lot tells Nancy, leaning so close to her ear that she can feel and smell his old-man's breath, “we got to tempt the devil.”

Lot turns Nancy loose, then waits expectantly. She doesn't know what to do. For the first time in 20 minutes, her right wrist is free, but where to run?

Then, she remembers the game Carter told her about once, the game that Lot made the younger children play. Tempt the Devil. Run over the top of the sawdust pile to the other side. Maybe, she thinks, if I can get a running start, I can hide out in the woods, or double back to the road. She remembers how Sam always warned about staying away from the burning hill, because of cave-ins, but she also remembers what the remainder of Billy Basset's face looked like.

“Me first,” she says, running away from Lot and up the side of the pile. The cinders immediately get into her loafers and cut like sandspurs, slowing her even more than the uphill grade.

She stops less than halfway up, to catch her breath and try to empty the cinders from her shoes, when she hears the breathing behind her. Lot is following her up the hill.

She loses one shoe, turns and continues toward the top. Every time she tries to cut left or right, Lot does the same behind her, herding her toward the very top of the man-made hill.

“Egypt, Holly. Egypt next,” she can hear him wheezing behind her. The smoke causes her eyes to tear and her nose to burn. She can hardly bear to put any weight on her feet now, and she finally loses the other shoe as she nears the top.

The pile gives worse than sand at the beach, but she finally crests the orange hill, with Lot only a few steps behind.

She's only just started down the other side of the pile when she loses her balance and topples forward, rolling, rolling forever, finally hitting the bottom, sawdust cinders stinging every part of her body.

Then she hears Lot. She looks up, squinting out of one eye, and he's silhouetted against the moon, at the pinnacle of the sawdust pile.

The last word she hears him say is “Egypt,” and then there's a whistling noise. Lot seems to be shrinking before her, first slowly and then suddenly. The muffled sound of a five-story sawdust pile collapsing on itself is all she hears, then there's nothing. Sawdust cinders rain down all over and around her, and the smoke is almost blinding. She crawls away from the pile, feeling her way until she can breathe again.

The first thing she sees, when one eye has rid itself of the cinders enough to open it, is Lot's barn. She has wandered around the pile counter-clockwise toward the house. Ahead, she can see her car, and a quick check shows her that she hasn't lost the keys. The car starts on the second try, and Nancy hits the headlights.

In the distance, where the sawdust pile used to dominate the skyline, she can make out an almost-flat surface through the smoke and burning cinders, with a red moon behind it.

Carter answers the door. Nancy has already been by her house to brush the cinders out of her hair and clothes as best she can and put tennis shoes over her wounded feet. If Carter notices the change in clothes, he doesn't say anything.

“I think you'd better have somebody go out and check on Uncle Lot,” she tells Carter. “I took his dinner inside, but he wasn't there, and something's happened to the sawdust pile.”

Sam gets back home at 10:30. Coming around the last turn, he can make out lights in his and Nancy's house, and he knows she hasn't left him yet.

Bobby Dance and David Faris help him unload the cooler full of blues that somebody has to clean or give away, and then they're off into the night.

Sam hasn't had much sleep. Every time he would nod off, he'd think about Nancy and he'd wish he were back in Monacan. He made a long-distance call from Nags Head to tell Corinne that he couldn't see her anymore, and she took it more casually than his ego might have wished.

“Oh, that,” she said. “Yeah, I think that might be a good idea, too.” And she hung up on him.

Now, putting his tackle into the garage, he decides the fish have enough ice to last until morning, and he unlocks the front door. There's only the one light in the foyer downstairs. Upstairs, he can make out a glow somewhere, and he guesses Nancy is reading in bed.

Time, he guesses, to get the verdict.

He hears the drawers opening and closing, and as he nears the bedroom door, he sees the two suitcases Nancy is rapidly filling.

She's wearing an old sweatshirt and jeans. She has a Band-Aid over her left eyebrow, and she's limping for some reason.

She gives almost no indication that she's seen him until he moves toward her.

“The last bus for Richmond leaves in 10 minutes,” she tells him, not bothering to look around. “If you're coming with me, you better start packing.”

NOW

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Suzanne and Marilou and the girls wait around until Nancy has signed a dozen or so copies of the book. Then it's their turn.

“Honey,” Suzanne says, “I just wish Pat could've seen this. He would've been so proud.”

Marilou just gives her sister the fish-eye and says, “EYE-ther?”

The girls, Nancy knows, would probably just as soon be somewhere else. Kate, who's 17 and favors Suzanne, gave up a Sunday afternoon date for this, and Polly, who's 14 and looks like her father, could have gone to Kings Dominion with her friends.

“Thanks for coming,” Nancy tells them both. Kate shrugs; Polly gives her mother a kiss on the cheek.

“I never thought anybody'd ask me for my autograph,” Nancy says.

“What'd you write?” Marilou asks. “Is it like yearbooks: ‘To a really great girl. Best wishes'?”